The attacks on Google GMail servers, allegedly by the Chinese government, have gotten a lot of press lately, ultimately leading to Google pulling out of China and transferring their search engine to their uncensored Hong Kong site, but let’s not lose sight of the cold hard fact that the Chinese government is still employing hackers, and these hackers are still going to try to attack the web-based email accounts of political dissidents. Nothing about the Google standoff has changed any of that.

Case in point: the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China (FCC) has just confirmed eight separate cases in which the Yahoo! e-mail accounts of foreign journalists based in China and Taiwan have been attacked.

Yahoo says it condemns such attacks, but unlike Google, they’re not taking a stand. In fact, they’ve apparently failed to alert their users to the situation. Yahoo has not answered the FCCC’s questions about the attacks, nor has it told individual mail users how the accounts were accessed,” an FCCC spokesman said.

With Yahoo! struggling to keep up with the likes of Google, it makes sense that they wouldn’t feel in as strong of a position to take a purely idealistic stance against censorship in China… but it is alarming the nonce to watch them stand by and not even alert the very users who are being hacked.